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Monthly Archives: January 2015

Yesterday was A. A. Milne’s birthday. I saw this posted on Facebook. I love Winnie the Pooh and there was a quote from one of the books. When I clicked on the post that was from Book Bub Blog, I noticed another link to a site that I have ignored for a while called Good Reads. So, they have a 2015 Challenge on there and I decided to take the challenge to read 25 books this year. I don’t know that I can do that many and yet, I don’t know that I can’t read more than that. We don’t have television, per se, so it isn’t like I am watching a ton of crap that is offered there so why not take the challenge.

Currently, I am reading lots of Buddhist type books and self help in order to get my head straight after my son’s death. For now, those are soothing and are inspirational. They are helping me to realize that I have things to work through. So, I need to update the site with those and add the books that I have read that I haven’t put on the site for a couple of years. I use a Kindle app on my phone and on my tablet and recently added it to my laptop but friends have been giving me real books to read and I still love to turn the real pages too.

I recently was gifted the book “Being Mortal”, by Atul Gawande. It is a great book about senior and medical care in our country and how there are some wonderful things that are being tested in nursing home facilities to allow seniors to feel like they are alive and not being treated like prisoners. There is still a long way to go to change the mindset to allow more of this to happen but in an age where we are keeping people alive, many times at ridiculous measures, it is nice to read that someone is trying new ideas and trying to treat these people with respect they have earned.

Another book that I just received is called Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I have only read a few pages but it looks like it is going to be a comforting book from a woman’s perspective on dealing with suffering and making suffering manageable.

And I was loaned Paul Newman’s book called “In Pursuit of the Common Good” about how he and his partner started their salad dressing business with all natural ingredients and the funny ways that they went about putting their product out onto the grocery shelves. They were trying to take the local approach and kept running into the large corporations who stifled their creativity.

It has only been in the past 10 years or so that I have really started reading in earnest. I tried to go back and read thing the classics because I wasn’t really interested in reading them when I was “supposed” to be reading them. Books like stories by Mark Twain, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island and A People’s History of the United States. I found that I really loved reading the biographies of our founding fathers. And I remember thinking to myself, as I was reading Mark Twain, “this is really good” and being embarrassed to say that out loud. Reading wasn’t really emphasized in my house growing up and it was in my husband’s. He is now a librarian so I have a good resource to go to for ideas of what to read. Both our boys were and are voracious readers.

So, I will go and update my list and see what the 25 books may be for 2015. I think, currently, I have about 6 different books in process at the same time. I may have to reread Winnie the Pooh just for grounding though.

“I don’t feel very much like Pooh today,” said Pooh.

“There there,” said Piglet. “I’ll bring you tea and honey until you do.”